Carme Grimalt-Álvaro
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
Promoting STEM literacy in early childhood education should help children to develop an understanding of what we know and how we know it. The interaction between children, phenomena, and context is an essential element to achieve this objective, as seen in previous parts of the guidebook. However, there is a strong consensus in the literature that the mere interaction between children and their environment is not enough to facilitate the construction and refinement of children’s ideas. Learning is considered a social practice because it occurs largely on a social plane (Vygotsky, 1978): interactions offer children the opportunity to develop their skills, imitating the actions of peers, teachers and/or parents, discussing the tasks that are carried out and making their own thought visible in a community… (Roschelle, Pea, Hoadley, Gordin, & Means, 2001). Thus, children cannot develop their full learning potential if they do not have the chance to interact with their peers, and especially with adults, when they are involved in STEM practices.
To take full advantage of children’s learning, teachers and parents have to foster children’s self-expression when they interact with the environment by:
Naming: Children’s verbalizations, labelling objects, materials, or situations with a name.
Describing: Children characterizing their own actions or the qualities of an object or phenomenon.
Comparing: Situations in which children can relate two (or more) materials or qualities (e.g.
identify similarities and differences).
Classifying and sorting: Grouping (objects, phenomena, etc.) according to similarities and differences among them (e.g. children are able to relate one element with a group of elements and not with another group). Arranging objects according to similarities or differences in an increasing/decreasing way (e.g. sorting 3 objects in which the medium object is at the same time larger than the small one and smaller than the large one).
Causality: Establishing cause and effect relationships among changes.
Giving reasons: Children give arguments based on previous items to justify their ideas in some way, that is, those cases in which the child simply gives an explanation about the question or the object.
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There is strong evidence that the capacity of children to engage in some of the previous practices significantly increases in the company and interaction of adults (Pedreira Álvarez, 2016), which reinforces the relevance of interaction with adults in early childhood STEM education. To promote children’s expression, teachers need to manage conversations to promote authentic dialogue, ask good questions, and interpret children’s words or actions to understand how they think (Pedreira Álvarez, 2016).
Three privileged opportunities to promote children’s knowledge by making their ideas explicit in STEM education
In the context of STEM education, there are three privileged opportunities to foster children’s learning by promoting dialogue: exploring children’s previous ideas, promoting the evolution and refinement of their ideas, and helping them structure their ideas.
Retrieving and exploring children’s previous ideas
The initial moments of the activity are used to present a topic of study (e.g. a problematic situation, a particular phenomenon triggering children’s curiosity, etc.). These initial moments represent a unique opportunity for teachers and parents to make explicit children’s initial ideas or experiences about the presented situation (e.g. What do you remember about…? When have you seen…? What do you think it will happen when…?). Children’s previous ideas or experiences will condition how they will further interact with the presented situation, so it is important for the teacher to know them at the beginning in order to provide subsequent appropriate feedback and guide children in their learning path. In other words, retrieving children’s previous ideas activates their previous knowledge and facilitates connections with the new ideas formed in subsequent activities.
Depending on the children’s age, the exploration of children’s previous ideas using language may present a challenge for teachers. Communication between the teacher and the children should also consider different forms, such as the use of body language (actions, gestures, looks, and sounds).
In addition, depending on the design of the activity (i.e. in free learning and play environments) retrieving children’s previous ideas at the beginning may be difficult. It is important to spend some time before children start to interact with the materials to ask them what they think they will find, what previous experiences they have, etc. By doing this exercise, we are providing the lenses with which we would like children to interpret the subsequent experiences.
Promoting the evolution and refinement of children’s ideas
To facilitate the construction and refinement of children’s ideas from their experience with a different phenomenon and/or context, teachers need to know not only the targeted STEM ideas which can be constructed from children’s interactions with the chosen situations or objects but also foresee other possible different ideas or conflicts which may appear during the activity. This previous planning is useful to prepare additional resources which can be used, if needed. However, it also opens a broad scenario of multiple possibilities, which makes it impossible to set in advance
STEM Needs Active Participation of Teachers, Children and their Families in Dialogue
one only way to promote the evolution of children’s ideas in an activity. In conclusion, the adult needs to be aware and identify the opportunities to interact and provide feedback to children to help them refine their ideas. For this purpose, three main strategies can be useful, as described by Pedreira Álvarez (2016) and Garrido Espeja (2016): contrasting children’s ideas, providing new evidence that can point to contradictions and suggesting new possible actions or interpretations.
Contrasting children’s ideas
Teachers use other children’s ideas to provoke children’s reconsideration of their own own ideas and positioning towards it (e.g. S/he said that this ball will fall faster; what do you think?).
Contrasting ideas can be carried out in an open way, where all children’s different points of view are equally considered and there is no attempt to change children’s views (e.g. Brainstorming), but also they can be directed, that is, emphasizing which children’s ideas better help to reach the learning goals (e.g. OK, let’s focus on what Carles is saying…) (Scott, Mortimer, & Aguiar, 2005).
Since open discussions can be useful in the first stages of learning sequences, as the activity goes on, children need to structure their ideas in a consensual and shared final model (Couso & Garrido, 2016), so more closed dialogues are needed.
Providing new evidence that can point to contradictions
Teachers can help children to find new evidence in the phenomenon or problem of study which can stimulate children’s contradictions with their previous ideas (e.g. Have you noticed that… Yes, but if I do this, I get another result…). Another example is to alternate the presentation of the elements or materials already classified in separate containers with the presentation of mixed elements or materials or to introduce discordant elements in a previously made series, as described in Pedreira Álvarez (2016).
Suggesting new possible actions, or interpretations
Sometimes, it is not enough to pose questions to children if teachers want to change their ideas, but new information needs to be introduced. Introducing new possible actions or interpretations does not mean an imposition of new ideas but suggests new ways to look to help children take a step forward. The suggestion of new possibilities can be done directly (e.g. Didn’t you consider doing this…?) or indirectly (e.g. Let’s look at this book to see if we can get more inspiration).
Helping children structure their own ideas
After children’s experience with the phenomenon, it is helpful to devote a final part of the lesson to sharing what they have learnt from it (e.g. What did you see when…? What have we learnt?) in order to reach a consensus towards these constructed ideas (e.g. So now we can say that…). Ideally, these final agreed-upon ideas would be very close to the desired STEM key ideas set by the teacher,
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at the beginning. Moreover, structuring children’s ideas should help answer their initial questions and compare their initial STEM ideas with later ones (Monteira & Jiménez-Aleixandre, 2016).
Structuring children’s ideas can be done orally in a circle, where teachers can highlight the questions and ideas constructed in the activity, but also as individual work, asking children to represent the ideas from the activity with pictures and annotations, for example (Pedreira Álvarez, 2016).
References
Couso, D., & Garrido, A. (2016). Models and modelling in elementary school pre-service teacher education: the influence of teaching scenarios. In 11th ESERA Conference Selected Contributions (pp. 1–18).
Garrido Espeja, A. (2016). Modelització i models en la formació inicial de mestres de primària des de la perspectiva de la pràctica científica.
Monteira, S. F., & Jiménez-Aleixandre, M. P. (2016). The practice of using evidence in
kindergarten: The role of purposeful observation. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 53(8), 1232–1258. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.21259
Osborne, J. (2014). Teaching Scientific Practices: Meeting the Challenge of Change. Journal of Science Teacher Education, 25, 177–196. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10972-014-9384-1
Pedreira Álvarez, M. (2016). «Puc tocar?» Anàlisi d’una proposta educativa del Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona per a infants de 2 a 6 anys. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Roschelle, J. M., Pea, R. D., Hoadley, C. M., Gordin, D. N., & Means, B. M. (2001). Changing how and what children learn in school with computer-based technologies. The Future of Children, 10(2), 76–101. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11255710
Scott, P. H., Mortimer, E. F., & Aguiar, O. G. (2005). The tension between authoritative and dialogic discourse: A fundamental characteristic of meaning making interactions in high school science lessons. Science Education, 90(4), 605–631. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.20131
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Interaction between learning and development. In Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (pp. 79–91). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0006-3495(96)79572-3